Las Urbanistas

RIVERSIDE, N.J., Sept. 25 — A little more than a year ago, the Township Committee in this faded factory town became the first municipality in New Jersey to enact legislation penalizing anyone who employed or rented to an illegal immigrant.

Within months, hundreds, if not thousands, of recent immigrants from Brazil and other Latin American countries had fled. The noise, crowding and traffic that had accompanied their arrival over the past decade abated.

The law had worked. Perhaps, some said, too well.

With the departure of so many people, the local economy suffered. Hair salons, restaurants and corner shops that catered to the immigrants saw business plummet; several closed. Once-boarded-up storefronts downtown were boarded up again.

Meanwhile, the town was hit with two lawsuits challenging the law. Legal bills began to pile up, straining the town’s already tight budget. Suddenly, many people — including some who originally favored the law — started having second thoughts.

So last week, the town rescinded the ordinance, joining a small but growing list of municipalities nationwide that have begun rethinking such laws as their legal and economic consequences have become clearer.

“I don’t think people knew there would be such an economic burden,” said Mayor George Conard, who voted for the original ordinance. “A lot of people did not look three years out.”

In the past two years, more than 30 towns nationwide have enacted laws intended to address problems attributed to illegal immigration, from overcrowded housing and schools to overextended police forces. Most of those laws, like Riverside’s, called for fines and even jail sentences for people who knowingly rented apartments to illegal immigrants or who gave them jobs.

In some places, business owners have objected to crackdowns that have driven away immigrant customers. And in many, ordinances have come under legal assault by immigration groups and the American Civil Liberties Union.

In June, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against a housing ordinance in Farmers Branch, Tex., that would have imposed fines against landlords who rented to illegal immigrants. In July, the city of Valley Park, Mo., repealed a similar ordinance, after an earlier version was struck down by a state judge and a revision brought new challenges. A week later, a federal judge struck down ordinances in Hazleton, Pa., the first town to enact laws barring illegal immigrants from working or renting homes there.

Muzaffar A. Chishti, director of the New York office of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonprofit group, said Riverside’s decision to repeal its law — which was never enforced — was clearly influenced by the Hazleton ruling, and he predicted that other towns would follow suit.

“People in many towns are now weighing the social, economic and legal costs of pursuing these ordinances,” he said.

Indeed, Riverside, a town of 8,000 nestled across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, has already spent $82,000 defending its ordinance, and it risked having to pay the plaintiffs’ legal fees if it lost in court. The legal battle forced the town to delay road paving projects, the purchase of a dump truck and repairs to town hall, officials said. But while Riverside’s about-face may repair its budget, it may take years to mend the emotional scars that formed when the ordinance “put us on the national map in a bad way,” Mr. Conard said.

Rival advocacy groups in the immigration debate turned this otherwise sleepy town into a litmus test for their causes. As the television cameras rolled, Riverside was branded, in turns, a racist enclave and a town fighting for American values.

Some residents who backed the ban last year were reluctant to discuss their stance now, though they uniformly blamed outsiders for misrepresenting their motives. By and large, they said the ordinance was a success because it drove out illegal immigrants, even if it hurt the town’s economy.

“It changed the face of Riverside a little bit,” said Charles Hilton, the former mayor who pushed for the ordinance. (He was voted out of office last fall but said it was not because he had supported the law.)

“The business district is fairly vacant now, but it’s not the legitimate businesses that are gone,” he said. “It’s all the ones that were supporting the illegal immigrants, or, as I like to call them, the criminal aliens.”

Many businesses that remain are having a hard time. Angelina Guedes, a Brazilian-born beautician, opened A Touch From Brazil, a hair and nail salon, on Scott Street two years ago to cater to the immigrant population. At one point, she had 10 workers.

Business quickly dried up after the law against illegal immigrants. Last week, on what would usually be a busy Thursday afternoon, Ms. Guedes ate a salad and gave a friend a manicure, while the five black stylist chairs sat empty.

“Now I only have myself,” said Ms. Guedes, 41, speaking a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese. “They all left. I also want to leave but it’s not possible because no one wants to buy my business.”

Numerous storefronts on Scott Street are boarded up or are empty, with For Sale by Owner signs in the windows. Business is down by half at Luis Ordonez’s River Dance Music Store, which sells Western Union wire transfers, cellphones and perfume. Next door, his restaurant, the Scott Street Family Cafe, which has a multiethnic menu in English, Spanish and Portuguese, was empty at lunchtime.

“I came here looking for an opportunity to open a business and I found it, and the people also needed the service,” said Mr. Ordonez, who is from Ecuador. “It was crowded and everybody was trying to do their best to support their families.”

Some have adapted better than others. Bruce Behmke opened the R & B Laundromat in 2003 after he saw immigrants hauling trash bags full of clothing to a laundry a mile away. Sales took off at his small shop, where want ads in Portuguese are pinned to a corkboard and copies of the Brazilian Voice sit near the door.

When sales plummeted last year, Mr. Behmke started a wash-and-fold delivery service for young professionals.

“It became a ghost town here,” he said.

Immigration is not new to Riverside. Once a summer resort for Philadelphians, the town became a magnet a century ago for European immigrants drawn to its factories, including the Philadelphia Watch Case Company, whose empty hulk still looms over town. Until the 1930s, the minutes of the school board meetings were recorded in German and English.

“There’s always got to be some scapegoats,” said Regina Collinsgru, who runs The Positive Press, a local newspaper, and whose husband was among a wave of Portuguese immigrants who came here in the 1960s. “The Germans were first, there were problems when the Italians came, then the Polish came. That’s the nature of a lot of small towns.”

Immigrants from Latin America began arriving around 2000. The majority were Brazilians attracted not only by construction jobs in the booming housing market but also by the presence of Portuguese-speaking businesses in town. Between 2000 and 2006, local business owners and officials estimate, more than 3,000 immigrants arrived. There are no authoritative figures about the number of immigrants who were — or were not — in the country legally.

Like those waves of earlier immigrants, the Brazilians and Latinos triggered conflicting reactions. Some shopkeepers loved the extra dollars spent on Scott and Pavilion Streets, the modest thoroughfares that anchor downtown. Yet some residents steered clear of stores where Portuguese and Spanish were plainly the language of choice. A few contractors benefited from the new pool of cheap labor. Others begrudged being undercut by rivals who hired undocumented workers.

On the town’s leafy side streets, some residents admired the pluck of newcomers who often worked six days a week, and a few even took up Capoeira, the Brazilian martial art. Yet many neighbors loathed the white vans with out-of-state plates and ladders on top parked in spots they had long considered their own. The Brazilian flags that flew at several houses rankled more than a few longtime residents.

It is unclear whether the Brazilian and Latino immigrants who left will now return to Riverside. With the housing market slowing, there may be little reason to come back. But if they do, some residents say they may spark new tensions.

Mr. Hilton, the former mayor, said some of the illegal immigrants have already begun filtering back into town. “It’s not the Wild West like it was,” he said, “but it may return to that.”

Damon Winter/The New York Times
City Councilman James Sanders Jr., with empty new town houses.

Along the streets of Far Rockaway, many recently built two- and three-family town houses sit waiting for even one family to move in. Some have boarded-up windows, while others have clumps of garbage in driveways that have never seen a car. Desperate developers hoping to cover their bets — and stem their losses — tape up both For Rent and For Sale signs inside windows that face nearly deserted streets.

Damon Winter/The New York Times
City Councilman James Sanders Jr. talking with constituents in southeast Queens. Mr. Sanders said his district has been hit hard by a credit and foreclosure crisis.

The same blocks were once home to sprawling single-family houses with wraparound porches. But during the superheated real estate market of just a few years ago, longtime residents sold out to developers who rapidly demolished the old to build rows of plain vanilla town houses sold, it seemed, to anyone who could sign a mortgage application.

But as the market cooled and credit got tighter, many of the new homes sat empty. On a few blocks, developers have built nothing but plywood walls to hide the weed-choked lots after the old houses were torn down.

“Folks just went crazy and got into the feeding frenzy,” said City Councilman James Sanders Jr., whose Far Rockaway office is wedged between undeveloped lots and mostly vacant town houses. “They thought money was going to come to everybody left, right and center. Irrational exuberance is what I call this.”

The empty homes and undeveloped lots, he said, are part of the unacknowledged effects of the larger credit and foreclosure crisis in minority neighborhoods, where subprime and predatory loans were common. Real estate values rose steadily, as did the optimism of aspiring first-time buyers, who entered into mortgages without fully understanding the terms of the loan or the responsibilities of ownership. When budgets got tight, they could always refinance, they were told.

Not anymore. Now, in large swaths of Mr. Sanders’s district in southeastern Queens, For Sale signs are as common as trees, as people try to bail out before losing what little equity remains in their homes. Similar scenes are found in central Brooklyn and the northeast Bronx, strongholds of minority homeowners whose fortunes have declined. While regulators have long been reluctant to rescue individuals they considered victims of their own greed or bad decisions, entire communities are now facing the consequences.

“Whole neighborhoods are wiped out, crime increases, the neighborhood’s reputation goes down, quality of life is undermined, and people can’t sell their houses,” said Susan Saegert, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, who recently completed a study of homeowners facing foreclosure. “That has already happened in Ohio and the Rust Belt. And it is starting to happen in New York.”

This has not come as a surprise to housing policy analysts and advocates who have been warning about the disastrous consequences of the freewheeling subprime market. At least five years ago, they sounded alarms over the spike in foreclosures among elderly homeowners who had been persuaded to take out costly refinancing loans to do repairs or raise money for emergencies. More recently, they saw a surge of first-time buyers taking out $500,000 mortgages at unfavorable terms even though they earned only $50,000 or less annually.

Sarah Ludwig, the executive director of the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project, said many people — first-time buyers who relied upon one-stop shops that provided a mortgage broker, appraiser and lawyer, and homeowners who refinanced their existing mortgages — were lured by offers of low monthly payments on adjustable rate loans. But those loans could become unaffordable once the interest rates reset, as is expected to happen in the coming months for many mortgages that began in 2005.

Ms. Ludwig’s group estimates that by year’s end, at least 14,700 homeowners in the city could be in default, mostly in minority neighborhoods, which she said were singled out for these loans.

“We have seen for the last 10 years a very serious problem with the concentration of high-cost loans, foreclosures and people losing their homes,” she said. “What is the toll of these loans?”

In many cases, when the true costs are revealed, the brokers who arranged the mortgages at unfavorable terms have long moved on with their fees, while the original lenders have already sold the loans on the secondary market to banks that used them to back securities. Increasingly, housing advocates have taken to task the big banks that scooped up these high-risk loans.

“The mortgage broker and the lender know this would not work if Wall Street had not been willing to buy these loans,” said Oda Friedheim, a Legal Aid Society lawyer in Queens who deals with many homeowners. “I look at this as a civil rights issue in those neighborhoods where people thought having a home was key to building individual wealth. But what happened is the wealth people built through their hard work has been transferred to Wall Street.”

Predatory lending was just part of a larger problem facing people whose budgets were already stretched thin, Dr. Saegert found in her study. In many cases, she said, family responsibilities pushed stressed homeowners over the edge. “We saw people who had relatives move into an apartment in the house and not pay anything,” she said. “They use resources but don’t contribute, and that just stretches you out more. We had one older couple who took in grandchildren when their daughter died, but they were on a fixed budget and had no way to take on the extra jobs to support them.”

She noted that while people often felt shame at their financial predicament, their efforts to get help were often rebuffed by companies who handled the payments. Unaware of local housing groups that could counsel them, many homeowners skipped paying other debts, ran up huge credit card bills or fell victim to so-called foreclosure rescue scams that tricked them into signing over their deeds.

“Their state of mind is the worst,” Dr. Saegert said. “The people who can legitimately help them are already overwhelmed and not looking for new clients. The people who are not legit are looking for them and they treat them nice. That is why people end up signing papers now not even thinking about it.”

When Carolene Brown and her husband, Patrick, faced foreclosure on their two-bedroom home in the Bronx, hardly a week went by that they were not visited by a friendly stranger offering to help. Five times, she said, they paid $500 in cash to swindlers, who claimed they could stop the foreclosure. In time, a friend of her husband’s offered to help them save the house. Instead, she said, they wound up signing over the deed to him and had the house sold out from under them.

“People always came to us to help,” said Ms. Brown, who said she has contacted prosecutors to help her reclaim her home. “I’m a strong person, and I do not like to talk about certain things. My family is big, and they could have helped me out. But I do not like to complain and ask for stuff. I always said I’d try to make this on my own.”

Councilman Sanders has heard that often.

“People always believe they can turn it around,” he said. “But in the end, they’re out of here and go to live with one of their children or wherever people go when they’re dying of shame.”

Along the many side streets of Arverne, where low-flying planes approaching Kennedy Airport regularly drown out conversation, Mr. Sanders pointed to block after block where homes were for sale or where failed developments turned into rushed rentals. Even closer to his office in Far Rockaway, unsold town houses have been rented to people he said are receiving government subsidies.

“That creates a different problem of changing the composition of the community,” he said. “They tip it from working class and middle class and into a concentration of poverty. You put people into homes who never learned how to manage living in one.”

Down one block of such homes, young men darted inside at the sight of strangers. Outside another drab development, overflowing garbage cans sat atop dusty patches of weeds and gravel.

“There always seemed to be an endless supply of people willing to buy these,” Mr. Sanders said. “Now the chickens have come home to roost. And the community is the one that’s hurt.”

Richard Hartog / LAT

THE PLAN: If the L.A. City Council votes yes, parking meters will be installed along such busy streets as Sunset Boulevard in the Sunset Junction area. Silver Lake would get 500 more meters.

First came the trendy clothing boutiques and vintage furniture stores that opened next to laundromats and liquor stores on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake.

Then came the upscale eateries and patio cafes.

Now comes the parking enforcement officer.

The city is moving forward with a plan to quadruple the number of parking meters in all of Silver Lake, mostly along the burgeoning business districts of Sunset, Glendale and Silver Lake boulevards.

Some merchants cheer the idea of adding 500 meters, saying it will help customers find parking in an area notoriously short on spaces. But some residents worry that the meters will mean less parking for them — and pressure on the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.

“It seems like it is becoming like every other place that becomes bourgeois,” said Tristan Saether, 24, a bartender who lives and works in the meter-free Sunset Junction neighborhood in the heart of Silver Lake. “It’s one more step toward high rent.”

Merchants and residents say parking problems have reached unbearable levels in Silver Lake. Along Sunset Boulevard, the competition for parking is fierce, causing motorists to travel up residential side streets in search of spaces.

“Parking is so bad already,” said Kelly Van Patter, who opened an environmentally themed home and garden shop in Sunset Junction two weeks ago. “It’s tough to find a spot as it is.”

Sean Eisele, 22, said he had to park 10 blocks from his home on Sunday. He arrived home at 9 p.m., forcing him to compete with visitors to the area’s restaurants.

“You have to dance around with your car,” said Eisele, a recent transplant from Philadelphia.

There’s a lot to attract shoppers to the new Silver Lake, with its heart in Sunset Junction — so named because it served as the rail car junction that once connected Sunset Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard.

On a recent evening, next to a Salvadoran pupuseria, a line of people filled Pazzo Gelato, with its huge windows and bright facade acting as a beacon for Sunset Junction. Farther east were boutique shops filled with shoes and a comic books store with shiny hardwood floors that doubles as an art gallery.

Diners chatted at an upscale microbrewery, an Indian restaurant that offers valet parking, and a packed organic vegan restaurant and deli.

Store owners say the problem is that workers or residents sometimes park on Sunset Boulevard for hours, making it difficult for customers to find street parking.

“These cars end up sitting for hours on end,” said David Ritchie, a co-owner of Secret Headquarters, a comic books store and gallery.

He admits he also has sometimes parked for several hours on Sunset.

But for the customers’ sake, he said, “It’d be nice if we got some turnover out there.”

That’s why merchants say they asked the City Council to add parking meters. The city’s transportation committee approved the idea Wednesday, with the council to vote on it in coming weeks. Under the proposal, the meters would operate from 8 a.m. to 8 or 10 p.m., Monday through Saturday.

Peter Choi, a past Silver Lake Chamber of Commerce chairman and owner of Serifos, a gift shop, said he often hears customers say, “I meant to stop by the other day, but I couldn’t find a spot, so I just went home.”

One- or two-hour parking limits aren’t rigorously enforced by the city. Parking meters are expected to make it easier for shoppers to get a shot at street parking, Choi said.

“They’ll have a better chance of stopping in front of a business and picking up a gift, a bottle of wine or a hunk of cheese,” Choi said.

In Silver Lake, much of the parking crunch is caused by new shoppers and new residents who, Choi said, are living in homes built in the 1920s or ’30s that might have only a one-car garage.

When the neighborhood was built, he said, most residents took the now-defunct Red Car trolley line to jobs in Hollywood because automobiles were unaffordable.

“You have all these little cottages packed in Silver Lake and there’s no parking for a lot of them,” Choi said. “Now you have exponentially more cars coming in as the neighborhood got more gentrified after the ’90s. It went from bus riders to gentrified couples with cars.

“The neighborhood was not really designed for cars. It was designed for Red Car trolley-riding 1920s Angelenos and not for the post-millennial double-car garage culture,” Choi said.

But the prospect of meters worries Fred Davis, a 60-year-old apartment manager who has lived in Silver Lake for 12 years.

“I don’t go for the parking meters; that’s like downtown, the Westside, Hollywood or around Santa Monica,” Davis said, adding that he enjoyed the area’s laissez faire attitude toward parking.

Sarah Dale, who runs Pull My Daisy, a clothing boutique in Sunset Junction, agreed. She said there is something to be said about Silver Lake as an off-the-radar neighborhood, an alternative to the glitz of the beach culture — home to gay businesses, musicians and eclectic, independent stores.

“The less the parking meters, the better the world,” Dale said. “I do think our little drag is really sweet. . . . I think there’s something great about parking your car, going to get lunch,” and then browsing at shops along the street — “without being under the gun to come back and feed the meter.”

Whatever may come, resident Anja Gardner fears that the neighborhood is losing its edgy distinctiveness.

“It’s not quite as quaint as it used to be,” said Gardner, 25, as she headed into a gelato shop on a recent warm night. “More money means less hip. That’s the way it is.”

ron.lin@latimes.com

 By Bill Turque Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, September 6, 2007; Page A01

The Town of Herndon announced yesterday that it would close its 21-month-old day-laborer center next week instead of complying with a judge’s ruling that the site must be open to all residents, including those who might be illegal immigrants.

Monica Almeida/The New York Times

Musicians in Mariachi Plaza, in the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles, with the light-rail construction site in the background.

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 3 — While Carlos Sanchez, a guitarist, waits in front of Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights to be picked up for his next job, he likes to look at a mural behind the plaza’s kiosk on First Street.

The New York Times

Boyle Heights is isolated from downtown and beach areas.

The mural, with colorful squares and spheres and scenes of local flavor, is reminiscent of the work of Mexican muralists like David Alfaro Siqueiros, but it is functional, too. It hides construction of a light-rail link that supporters in Boyle Heights and neighboring East Los Angeles say will change the face of their communities.

Boyle Heights, part of the City of Los Angeles, and East Los Angeles, an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County, have long been home to thousands of Latinos. Both communities are cut off geographically from the city’s beach districts and central business areas.

The light-rail train, set to begin running in 2009, will allow passengers to get to areas throughout the county. For many low-income residents, like Mr. Sanchez, 38, who do not own cars, the train will replace bicycles, unreliable buses and costly taxis.

“I’ll be using the train because it’s going to be more convenient and a faster way to get to where you want to go,” said Mr. Sanchez, who often car-pools to jobs with fellow musicians.

The train, named after Edward R. Roybal, who in 1949 became the first Mexican-American elected to the Los Angeles City Council, will travel six miles from the Little Tokyo/Arts District in downtown through Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles. It will link to the Los Angeles subway system on the Gold Line, which runs south from Pasadena. A one-way trip now costs $1.25.

Diana Tarango, who is on an advisory committee for the project, said the light-rail link had been in the works for 12 years.

“The Gold Line is a method of transportation that is very much needed in East Los Angeles and Boyle Heights because we’re so transit dependent,” she said.

“So many of our people do go out to work in houses in West L.A.,” she said. “In order to get there, why shouldn’t they have the luxury of something comfortable, fast and running on schedule?”

Community advocates see the train as a possible gateway to improving East Los Angeles and bringing economic vitality to the area, the oldest Mexican-American community in the county.

Standing before Mariachi Plaza, so named because Mexican musicians gather there to wait for work, José Huizar, a Los Angeles city councilman, spoke of plans to transform the intersection at First and Boyle Streets, which is a jumble of construction sites and small businesses.

“The potential here is tremendous,” said Mr. Huizar, who grew up in Boyle Heights. “My vision for this area is to have restaurants and a commercial center here. We’re going to have a lot of people from downtown coming up here during lunchtime. They’ll be on the subway in five minutes and get here and listen to mariachi music during the day and evening.”

The area’s county supervisor, Gloria Molina, said the light rail was part of what she called the renaissance of East Los Angeles.

“The first thing you do is upgrade the area,” Ms. Molina said, “and that will attract private investment.” She said a Starbucks opened in East Los Angeles in March, and a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf and a Quiznos sandwich shop opened three years ago.

But there are no major stores like Target in the area. The storefronts that line major streets are small businesses like clothing stores and restaurants trying to keep a foothold as local shoppers head to stores and malls in nearby cities.

The makeup of Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles has changed little since the late 1960s. Both areas are known for their large Latino populations and for Mexican-themed murals on convenience stores, schools and public buildings.

But that has not always been the case, said George Sanchez, a history professor at the University of Southern California.

At one time, Boyle Heights had significant Jewish and Japanese communities. Other ethnic groups, including Russians and Italians, also called the area home.

“Boyle Heights from the 1920s to the 1950s was the most diverse suburb in both the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County,” said Mr. Sanchez.

Evidence of the region’s past cultural diversity also extends to East Los Angeles, where Jewish, Serbian and Chinese cemeteries can be found. Proof that Chinese residents worked on the railroads in the 1800s was unearthed in the form of grave markers and bones during the construction of the light-rail project.

“The one thing you can say about East L.A. is that it’s never had an identity crisis,” said Oscar Gonzales, president of the East Los Angeles Residents Association. “It’s always known of its history and, more important, its future.”

That future, with the rail line, may be gentrification, Ms. Molina and others say. “It should change for the better,” she said. “You’re going to see more businesses along the transit lines.”

There is a dividing line in Chinatown — a narrow, inconspicuous alley that twists its way between Massachusetts Avenue NW and I Street.

The District’s recent decision to close it to make way for an office building complex estimated to cost $206 million has exposed a festering animosity between two influential Asian civic groups and launched a battle over the future of Chinatown.

In a community that rarely airs its disagreements publicly, the clash escalated until D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray (D) intervened.

“This alley closing and what came with it was a symptom of a deep-rooted and long-standing conflict,” said Gray, who has presided over four mediation sessions with the two groups.

On one side is the 25-year-old Chinatown Steering Committee, led by Chinatown’s unofficial mayor, 82-year-old Duane Wang, and powerful restaurateur Tony Cheng. On the other is the month-old Chinatown Revitalization Council, led by 54-year-old computer consultant Alexander Y. Chi.

Both sides want Chinatown to blossom. But the upstart revitalization council says that under the steering committee’s watch, Chinatown has dwindled to “Chinablock” — H Street between Sixth and Seventh streets. And there’s not much Chinese about that anymore, the critics say, other than the ornate phoenix and dragon archway on H Street and Cheng’s Mongolian barbecue restaurant.

Chi said the lack of vision has stifled the growth of the area as a destination point with uniquely Chinese attractions like other Chinatowns across the country. New office buildings, trendy restaurants and chain stores have overshadowed the family-owned Chinese shops, he said.

One of the block’s most famous restaurants, Golden Palace, was torn down to make way for Gallery Place. The block’s newest eatery is Vapiano. It will serve pizza.

Cheng, 58, said his critics are just upset that government officials have long viewed him and Wang as Chinatown’s leaders. “A lot of people are jealous because of all we have, because of all we do,” he said, sitting in his restaurant’s dining room, across from a circular tank filled with crabs.

And Chi is breaking one of the most important tenets of Chinese culture, Cheng said. “He doesn’t respect older people. Duane Wang is 82 years old,” he said. “You may have smarts, but you are not smarter than him.”

Wang said his group has made Chinatown safer and made it look more Chinese by pushing through lampposts, sidewalk bricks emblazoned with the Chinese zodiac and a requirement for Chinese lettering on the signs of all stores. Wang and Cheng say they need more support from the city to force developers to go beyond those small architectural touches.

Gray worries that without a major push to unite the civic groups, efforts to preserve Chinatown’s heritage could stall for years.

But his role as mediator has been difficult. During meetings, the groups have planted themselves on opposite sides of his office. Some people had not spoken to each other in two years. And when they do speak, their words are harsh.

Chi said it’s time for the steering committee to step aside or to at least allow others to be included in negotiations with developers and the city about what should be in Chinatown.

“They have so much passion, but it becomes the baggage,” he said. “They can’t see the forest for the trees.”

Alfred Liu, the architect who designed the archway in the 1980s, even balked at Wang’s unofficial title as the community’s mayor. “The mayor of Chinatown. . . . Did we have an election?” said Liu, who has ditched his seat on the steering committee for one with the revitalization council.

The city Office of Planning gives weight to the steering committee’s recommendations when considering developments. Wang, with Cheng at his side, represented the neighborhood in one of the biggest developments in recent history in Chinatown: a 360,000-square-foot office building with a 300-space underground parking garage along Massachusetts Avenue proposed last year by developer Kingdon Gould III.

The steering committee and the revitalization council, along with downtown business groups, liked the idea because the block had deteriorated — it’s dotted with abandoned houses — and Gould promised to incorporate Chinese motifs in the design. The hope was that the development could revitalize that area, a block from the bustle of H Street.

That’s where the alley fight came in.

As other developers have done, Gould said he offered the steering committee a “benefits package” as a good-neighbor gesture. He offered $1 million for affordable housing in Chinatown, 13,000 square feet of space for community activities, $100,000 in grants for programs and 10 free parking spots for committee members, according to documents submitted to the D.C. Council.

Gould’s pledges hinged on closing part of the alley to make a service entrance, according to documents submitted to the D.C. Council.

But the alley happens to be right behind the homes of several steering committee members. They objected, and Wang and Cheng backed them, citing inconvenience and a potential increase in crime.

At a June council hearing, Gould testified that Wang and Cheng would not compromise.

Gray stepped in to mediate the impasse behind closed doors.

Gould apparently then decided to go around the steering committee. He redesigned the plans and cut the community space to 4,100 square feet. Instead of allowing the steering committee to operate the space, as they wanted, he specified that several community groups share it when the building is completed in about 3 1/2 years.

Gould also pledged $600,000 to the Chinese Community Church for roof repairs, a discount to Asian retailers who might want to lease retail space in the new building and $850,000 to a nonprofit group in Adams Morgan for affordable housing — a couple of miles from Chinatown.

Last month, the D.C. Council approved the terms, 12 to 1. The dissenter was council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8), a longtime friend of Cheng. “I think Tony Cheng and the old-timers have been discarded,” he said.

In the end, the deal satisfied neither side. The revitalization council, which supported Gould’s plan, says that the affordable housing money never should have left Chinatown’s borders and that the $600,000 given to the church should have been spread among more groups.

“As a community, we missed an opportunity,” Chi said.

And no one seems to share Gould’s vision of shared community space, either.

Chi and others are fighting to get it, saying Cheng and Wang monopolize the Chinatown Community Cultural Center, a 3,000-square-foot space developer Herb Miller gave the community when he built Gallery Place.

Cheng is the center’s president; Wang is vice president. Cheng’s daughter is executive director; Wang’s daughter teaches English classes there.

Wang denies monopolizing the center and argues that it has been put to good use, emphasizing the table tennis and martial arts classes.

Dwan Tai, a former member of the steering committee, wants Gray to help other groups get use of the Gould community center.

Gray said his biggest achievement so far has been to get the two groups in the same room. He’d like to create an inclusive and neutral Chinatown Advisory Planning Council to divvy up use of the new community center and create a vision for Chinatown.

Wang said he knows the two groups must unite for Chinatown to survive and flourish.

“There’s an old Chinese saying, ‘When two fish fight, who wins?’ ” he said.

He paused, then put up his fists and hit them together to show their battle. “The fisherman.”